Capstone Project with South Fayette: Stack Builder

As part of my Masters program, we must complete a capstone project. This allows us to have practical experiences working with clients and stakeholders to create real solutions. My team is working with South Fayette high school in Mcdonald, PA. The goal of this project is to move away from the method of education where students get trapped in one topic or subject area even before reaching college. Our goal is to increase student autonomy and internal motivation to help them find the best path forward for their future, whether that be college or straight into the job force.

In order to achieve this, our group started by researching the problem space. This included background research such as competitive analysis of other school districts and doing research into the history of education in general. We interviewed stakeholders to understand what was important to them and what motivates them. Our stakeholders include students, parents, teachers, and administrative staff. We also used participatory design methods to gain insights about our client’s vision for the project. We shared our research with our clients and are using their feedback to direct the next stage of development for this project.

As a team, we created prototypes to test assumptions of what could work. This included a variety of methods such as interviews, Wizard of Oz studies with AI recommendations, and cardboard prototypes. During this stage, our prototypes were meant to be tested quickly and to gain insights for specific questions and problems. We were able to use the information that we learned from the prototyping phase to create our final solution.

Our solution is a software that we called Stacks. This software is designed to help students track what they have done and use that information to help them discover new patterns or options. Students can view their experiences in different ways, such as a time line or clustering similar things together. Stacks tracks not only classwork, but extracurriculars and opportunities outside of school. This allows for the student to get a more complete view of what they are interested in. For this project, I created a database to hold student, class, extracurricular, and general event information. I also helped create an AI recommendation system that provides students with recommendations based on their interests and previous experiences.